ACADA

Friday, 3 May 2013

How to pass exams? 7 useful tips

Note: This is an article
particularly for the students of Accountancy i.e. those who are taking up CA,
ICMA, ACCA or any other relevant exam. However, the techniques explained
here can be used by candidates for exams other than accountancy as well.

One of our teachers told us:You have whole life to study but
only six months to pass this paper. So, concentrate on understanding what
examiner wants.

Here are 7 tips to help every student pass exams, based on
my personal experience:

1. No limiting belief please

- Remove
the limiting belief that you can’t pass.

- If
you believe you can pass or you believe you cannot pass, you are right.

- I have seen students under
the impression that examiner is their enemy. Please don’t think so. Pass
percentage might be low, but students do pass their exams. So, don’t think that
you will be in a failure category ever.

2. Understand the structure of
paper

- First of
all, understand the structure of paper – is there any marks allocation for a
particular topic?

- Secondly,
if there is marks allocation, is examiner following it? The best thing to do is
to review the past five papers.

- What is
the key topic i.e. examiner’s favorite? Is there any article by examiner in the
Students’ Accountant or any other relevant student magazine? Study that topic
and prepare for it, even if you don’t like it!

3. Taking notes

- Prepare
for exams by way of ‘notes’ which you can recall quickly at the time of
taking exam. This will help in two manner. First, when you write, you are in
better picture of giving your mind instruction through written letters.
Secondly, you can revise from your notes instead of opening the book when exam
day is near. Here is my strategy for taking notes:

- Take a
paper and turn it in landscape format.

- Put
three columns in landscape form.

- Once
done, take synopsis of a chapter in smaller fonts and the language which you
can easily understand.

- Write
bullet points, important concepts and key ideas which you need to remember.

- These
notes should be used at the time when paper is on head and you need to revise
whole subject in two to three hours.

4. Remembering / memorizing key
ideas and formulae

- One of
the key ideas to memorize ideas e.g. formulae, is to write them in small charts
and hang it in front of your bed.

- See
those formulae daily before going to bed and rising up.

- Use
different colours and markers.

- Believe
me, in my statistics paper, I was recalling the formulae in the exact colours
which I wrote on charts.

5. Exam practice

- Practice
mock exam – be your own examiner.

- Take any
past paper and solve it as a mock exam.

- Solve
past paper in the time allocated in exam. Think you are in exam hall and solve
the paper accordingly.

- Check
your paper and give yourself marks.

- See how
are you performing in mock exam and be sincere to yourself.

6. Time your paper

- Here is technique to time your paper: Take total marks and
total time. Subtract 10 minutes from the total minutes. Divide the remainder
with the marks and you get time per marks

- example: If there are 100 marks for a paper and you have
180 minutes. Subtract 10 minutes. This means you have 170 minutes altogether or
1.7 minutes per mark.

- make sure that you don’t spend more that 1.7 minutes per mark
e.g. if a question is of 10 marks, maximum time you should spend should be
17 minutes.

- It happens that students try to focus on one particular
question and if they are unable to solve it, they get confused. Don’t panic.
Start next question. If student has time, he / she can take up that particular
question later on.

- Try to allocate 10 minutes at the end of exam to review
the paper thoroughly.

7. Don’t annoy examiner

See for spelling errors and writing style. Writing needs to be
legible and understandable. As a teacher to many students, I have noticed that
spelling errors and the way students write, at times, is not understandable.
Examiner has very less time to check paper. If your paper is examiner friendly,
you are going to attract good marks.

In 2004, I made a presentation on examination techniques at
one of the seminars organized by ACCA. Here is the PDF version of the
presentation: